Update

So the site where I had the encounter with the Right-Wing Troll held a brief forum with those who commented there, saying that they had received complaints about the troll, and that they were inclined to begin deleting such abusive emails in the future. They asked for thoughts on this policy.

Comments came out strongly in favor of not just deleting abusive comments, but of banning those who showed a pattern of making such comments. (I was one of those who argued for this policy, using basically the argument I made here.)

The site owner then banned Dick Johnson from the site.

As some of you may have noticed, Dick almost at once began posting abusive and stalker-type comments here. He'll be banned and deleted here as well, no fear, and for the same reasons he's banned and deleted there.

Rand Paul, Ayn Rand, Now What Now?

Every so often I get a student who read Atlas Shrugged when he (somehow it nearly always is a male student) was fifteen or sixteen.

He's nearly always an otherwise bright student, a kid I want to like, and try hard to teach.  But his critical acumen has been blunted -- well, destroyed -- by his encounter with this philosophy.  I supposed we can call it a philosophy?  With this crack-pipe of a book.  

In any case, I sometimes try, mildly, to point out the errors of the Randian position (If a fast food company poisoned its customers, who would eat at that restaurant?  If Wal-Mart treats its workers unfairly, surely they would all quit?  If people are injured at the steel mill due to its unsafe working conditions, why, they can always sue!  In civil court, of course.  Or, I suppose, their survivors can...and if enough people sue...and their lawyers are better than the steel mill's lawyers...and the steel mill has not happened to have bought the judge, being vastly richer than the mill worker who is making two dollars a day, why then...) --- it's like arguing with a Pentecostal, though.  Nowadays I mainly smile and say, Ah, Rand.  And move on.

Here, though, at the Washington Monthly, they're still fighting the good fight.  Which pleases me.  Someone needs to.

As Paul envisions the system working, just so long as everyone honors the free market above all, "no one will apply for those jobs" if a mine's operators don't do a good job protecting worker safety.

Tony Oppegard, a Kentucky attorney and mine-safety advocate, called Paul's statement "idiotic." He added that underground mines are already offer dangerous working conditions, and if Paul successfully eliminated safety mandates, "there would be a bloodbath," he said.

As for the notion that coal-mine workers would just get jobs somewhere else if they weren't satisfied with the safety precautions, Oppegard concluded, "There's no other job opportunities."

It's Just the Taxes They Don't Like...

...Brown people are fine.

Study shows that Tea Baggers are twice as racist as your general Republican, which, wow.

(Amanda at Pandagon has started calling them Tea Crackers, which kinda cracks me up, I gotta say.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules Yet Again

On Trent Frank's lunatic longing for the good old days.

Coates:

...when I read this, as when I read many conservative politicians, speak on African-Americans, I just feel sorry for them. Before you explain to someone that a "policy" built on selling children, government-sanctioned torture, and forced labor is worse than any policy in place to day, you should come to terms with the fact that your breaths are limited, and your days numbered. You have to budget your outrage.

Oh My

Just in time, b/c I needed something to cheer me up today:

Signs from the Teabagging party!

My personal favorite is "Homosexuals Are Gay," though "Death To All Juice" is also very cute.

How Batshit Crazy is The Right?

This Crazy:

Perhaps an eccentric citizen has become convinced that the President is an alien from Mars, and the courts should order DNA testing to enforce the Constitution.

That's not made up.  That's an actual Right-Wing Tea-bagger suing the U.S. Government, alleging that Obama is not eligible to be President, submitting stacks and stacks of reasons, and that is one of them.

Between this Birther nonsense and their obsession with what other people do with their sexual organs, can we please start ignoring the Right now, please?  Please?

They Ain't Racist

And even if they are, you know, it's racist to say they're racist!
And we're the racists! Because we make it all about race!

Tbogg argues otherwise.

My favorite among the comments so far is this one, from A Mom Anon:


I live in the South. There’s a little “family owned”business here that’s proudly racist. There’s a “White History Year” sign on the front door of the place and lynching photos and other”memorabilia” are prominently displayed and easily visible through the front windows. Recently the owner of this shop recieved a civic award for his civil war reinactment camp for(white,male only)kids. Everyone knows the place is a front for KKK/skinhead types and no one bats an eyelash. The place is smack in the middle of the newly rennovated “historic district”.

Here’s a hint for Hawkins: You don’t have to worry about being called a racist if you aren’t a fucking racist. I’ve lived 50 yrs and no one has ever even hinted I was racist. Wonder why that is?….

But They're Not Racist!

More from our Right-Wing Not Racist Friends:

This is from a Comment over on Feministing, on that Michelle Obama/Gorilla story:

My FIL regularly spams my husband with inane rethuglican email forwards. About half of them are racist, and the other half are X-tian wet dreams about how God will eventually punish all those libruls and atheists. The rest are sexist jokes.... So the other day my husband is purging his inbox of another batch of his Dad's email forwards which uncharacteristically belong in the latter category, so he says "At least he didn't send anything horribly offensive this time". And then he opens the last one...

It contained something to the extent of "A little girl wrote to Sarah Palin and asked where humans came from. Palin wrote back saying that Gawd made Adam and Eve in his own image.

Then the little girl wrote to Michelle Obama and asked her the same question. Obama wrote back saying that there was a bunch of monkeys that eventually turned into humans. The little girl goes to her grandfather [I wonder why not her parents; they must have turned away from Jebus and embraced the evil librul ways] and asks to explain the discrepancy in the answers.

So Grandpa replies "Honey, Palin told her about her ancestors, and Obama told you about hers"" In closing, there was a picture of a chimp next to Michelle Obama's picture.

Even aside from the fact that any human with a single functioning braincell could not possibly be a creationist, and the fact that chimps are not monkeys, that email was something I would have thought only Klansmen would forward. And the sad thing is that my FIL is normally one of the nicest, most helpful people I've ever met (I guess only to white people, though). Just goes to show how ingrained and accepted racism is in our society: it's definitely not just the domain of kooky extremist Neo-Nazis.

But That's Not Racist

Here we see a GOP loon equate a gorilla to Michelle Obama -- and then try to claim he's not the racist one, that Michelle Obama is racist (or, I guess, all Leftists are racist?) since, this Right-Wing Toolbox claims she said she was descended from apes -- by which, I guess, he thinks Obama supports science eduction/evolutionary theory.

That doesn't make her racist, anymore than it makes her or any of us descended from apes (as anyone who isn't an ignorant GOP toolbox knows, evolutionary theory shows we share a common ancestor with other primates, which does not mean "descended from apes").  It makes this GOP loon an idiot, and a racist one.

(Also, just while we're here? How in shit could a modern ape be an ancestor to anyone?  He's a whole crate of toolboxes, this fella.)

They Ain't Racist!

And besides, feminists are ugly.

That's what's getting said on the Winger Blogs over those specious charges that the Teabag -- oh, excuse me -- the tea-parties -- are an entirely white folks, and an oddly motived event.

What, we wonder, are these whacks protesting? I mean, the bail-outs? Bushco passed those. And the debt? Bushco. And the fucked economy? Your team. So....what's Obama done, again, precisely, that you don't like?

Stimulus package? Most of that was Bush. Ooo, he passed ANOTHER?

Oooo, you mean you just think HE should stop spending money we don't have? On things you don't like? But you were fine with Bush spending money we didn't have?

Or is it PWB you don't like?

Memories!

Oh, yes!  I'd forgotten this one!

That dark little fantasy of Obama opening "camps" for the good Christian Right is one I've been seeing over on Right-Wing blogs for five or six months now.  mr. delagar, when I yelled at him to come read this one, now, snorted in amused disgust. 

"We can't open re-education camps for the Right," he pointed out.  "First they'd have to be educated."

Teh Funny

Edge of the American West visits White Supremists, and it would be funny, if I didn't have these guys among my kin, you know.

As it is, I'm too busy wincing to laugh.

The PARKER!!

Kathleen Parker, that charming loon who said you weren't a real American unless both sides of your family were white folk all the back for 200 years (see here for the column, cause I know you want to read it again), whose abysmal "column," close-packed with her hateful version of American family values, is frequently featured in my local paper (feminists bad! men good! Democrats crazy! and so on) -- well, Parker has written a book, called, isn't this cute, Save the Males.

I heard about this a few weeks ago, and have been haunting the sphere, waiting for someone to review it so I wouldn't have to read the copy our library is certain to buy. (They buy all Ann Coulter's books, too.)

Well! I open Atrios this morning, and what do I find? A link to a review! And yes! Parker's book sucks just as much as I expected! Oh joy! Oh bliss!

I haven't been this happy since people FINALLY started waking up to the realization that Hoff-Sommers' piece of crap, War Against the Boys, was, in fact, an utterly dishonest bit of propaganda -- which took awhile, as I recall. Why did people take her seriously at first? Oh, wait, I remember now: because she said what they wanted to hear: girls bad, men good, (women) teachers are stupid and evil. Yeah, I remember.

Trying Hard Not to Violate Godwin's Law

If you read that sickening column by Kathleen Parker, noted Townhall whacktard, which was widely published, not just in the Washington Post, but in newspapers all over the nation, claiming that only (white) Americans who had anscestors who had been born in this country for the past two hundred years -- on both sides!! One side only doesn't count!! -- really count as Americans, because only *those* people can really *feel* what it means to be an American (not, in other words, some (dark guy) named Obama...if that made you as furious and as queasy as it did the rest of us, well, go on over here to Bitch Ph.D. where it gets ripped up one side and down the other:


http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2008/05/who-gets-to-be-american-jeremiad.html

They Report, You Get Stupider

Fox can't tell Frederick Douglass from Stephen Douglas -- I kid you not.

Which isn't even the saddest bit -- the saddest bit is that no one at Fox can do two seconds research. As several commentors at Pandagon pointed out, if you put Lincoln/Douglass debate into Google, even if you can't spell Douglass, what comes up is images of Stephen Douglas and Lincoln, not Frederick and Abe.

(Via Edge of the American West)

Why I Just Love the Right

Over here, that fucking idiot Dr. Helen talks about the poor and why people are poor. Then her smart commenters chime in. Since all of them have known people who are poor -- or, at least, you know, their sister's cousin had a friend who worked with or used to try to hire poor people, back in the day -- you won't be surprised to find all of them have a perfect understanding of poverty in these United States, and know everything about why people are poor.

It's because they are (a) lazy and (b) like to cheat and (c) feel entitled to live off the rest of the good, hard-working people in America (which is to say Dr. Helen's commenters. Oh, and don't forget they're all fat too. That gets mentioned several times. And they have lots of fat, lazy, cheating children each.

She's responding to this book, which suggests that the poor, far from being idiots in not doing wise things like saving up their spare fifty cents every day to invest in the stock market, or trying to find enough coupons every week to save two dollars in grocery money so they can put that two dollars weekly toward buying health insurace (why can't they earn their way out of poverty? Lazy slobs!) are actually making the best choices within their purview when they invest that extra two bucks they have on ice cream or tequila or a lottery ticket.

Dr. Helen thinks it's a stupid book. Because she knew some poor people once, so she knows what poor people are like, and they aren't either making the best choices they can with what they know at the time -- they're out to get her! They're evil! If they weren't evil they wouldn't be poor! QED!

Why You Pick On Us?

More whining from the Right on how they can't get jobs in the Academy b/c it's full of Leftists who discriminate against good white Right Christian males, and also here a smackdown of this utter crap, which, as the post notes, is just the same old whine the right has been whining for years now.

See also LG&M, who shot the bit of shite down as well.

(Via Unfogged)

Whack the Powerless, That Will Teach'em

So this post by Rob is getting some attention in the 'sphere.

He blogs about his students, who, while writing about some other issue, mention the Iraqi attack on us on 9/11.

I've had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn't be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed "the Iraq's" to attack us on 9/11.

Rob's point is that these students believe, as an absolute fact, like gravity sucking, that Iraq was behind the attack on the Twin Towers. Okay, well, half my students believe America was founded as a Christian nation, and that the war on Christmas is real, and white guys are the real victims in this country.

But what's to be done when students put this sort of thing in their essays?

Plenty of comments, at Rob's site and at Crooked Timber, where I first saw the story, argued (well, ranted) for failing the students. "You did fail the students, right?" "Can't university professors fail students?" and like that.

Here's the issue I have with this solution: yes, clearly these students are wrong. On the other hand, (a) they're wrong because our culture has told them, over and over, that this answer is the right answer. Why would they doubt that this thing is true when everyone around them has insisted this thing is true for as long as they can remember?

And (b) how will failing them help?

This is my problem with failing students. Are we here to harm or to help? Yes, the students are wrong. Well, let's make them right. Smacking them with an F will not help anything. What might, then? Saying, hey, you know, I see many of you have a misapprehension here. Why don't we do some research? Why don't we learn to check assumptions before we turn in a paper?

I do this in my Freshman writing class -- I use mistakes I have made as examples. "Here's what I thought the truth was," I say. "Then I did research, and here's what I found out the truth was. Why do we do research?" I ask.

I say, "What do we know?"

I say, "What do we really know?"

I get them to see how little they actually know: I teach them to think about this before they turn in their first papers. But I never grade that first paper, even so, because it will be filled with idiotic things like Iraq attacked us on 9/11 and Jesus wants us to vote for Bush and children should always do what adults say no matter what, and I will have to say to them, really? You really think that's so? You really think a child should do what an adult says? No matter what? So a guy comes up to her on the playground and says come get in the car with me, you want your little girl to obey him, do you?

I'm saying we're in the university (and the universe) to teach our students.

Doing them harm isn't the best way to teach them.

And the angry attitude toward the students -- who are not the ones who caused the problem, who are not the author of the fucking lie, which I think we should remember -- I have to say I find it disturbing.

Yep, Them Founding Fathers, It's Amazing

As The Other Liberal Professor can attest, Huckabee's ignorance here is no shock to any of us here in Arkansas.

We always have to do this interesting tug-of-war with our Far-Right Christian students, here in Arkansas, when we start teaching the first half of American Lit (TOLP teaches it more often than I do, and so endures this dance more often than I). When we hit the part of the course that deals with the literature written by Benjamin Franklin and the other Founders, we have to point out that no, in fact, many of them were not Christians, that, in fact, many were Deists. We have to say what that means. We have to talk about the text of the Declaration and the Constitution as Enlightenment texts. We have to talk about what this means.

We provide evidence.

Many of our students, not having been educated in far-right Christian schools, can understand evidence. They have no trouble with any of this.

Those who come from the local fundamentalist education factories, though -- ai. They've been taught the funamentalist version of history. No fact we present will interfere with what they know to be Truth.

And our facts? Well, they're just opinions.

"You're entitled to your opinion," one of these students kept telling TOLP, one semester.

B/c, you know, all those university professors, who had done all that research, and written their historical texts about the founders? Just guys with opinions. Her preacher? He had the truth.

So we can just shut up.

Weather, Gore

The Wingers are in a predictable snit over Gore winning the N.P.P., which might be amusing to read about on their blogs if it wasn't so predictable. They're still making the same dull jokes about global warming -- haw, haw, Al Bore made his speech about global warming in the middle of a blizzard, haw! -- and of course the peace prize is ALL POLITICAL!!1!

Meanwhile, here in AR it's the middle of October and the heat of summer has only just -- two days ago -- broken. Up until two days ago, we were still breaking 90 every single day, running the AC night and day. Now, finally, we're in the 70s during the day, and getting below 60 at night. Last month I had another power bill that was nearly $300 as a consequence.

Yeah, nothing to this climate change deal.